$20k is nothing for a server when you are building high reliability systems which need a lot of processing power.
One project for a large banking system spent about $14 million on servers. Some of the servers were $3.2 million each. They were the size of a fridge and the expansion cabinet was equally large. Had to reinforce the datacenter floor and add additional power to the building.
Ya. I’ve worked in data enters.
I’ve found that when it comes to hosted services, it’s cheaper to build it in house about half the time.